I am an intact American Baby Boomer because I was born in a European hospital. My American father asked that I be cut, but the European doctor who delivered me refused. During my first examination by an American pediatrician, my American grandmother kicked up a fuss about my foreskin. The pediatrician invited my European mother to have me cut, but she refused. And thus I became the only member of my family of origin to sport a whole penis. My younger brother was cut without my parents ever being asked whether they consented.
But my parents never spoke to me about this until my mother broke down one day when I was 19, and told me what’s in the previous paragraph (and more that I prefer to keep private). My father’s reticence was perhaps for the best; he had no talent for dealing with delicate human situations. My mother was often shrewd about many things, but in this tender area, she kept her own counsel until I was grown up. I suspect that she simply did not know what to say to an intact boy growing up in a circumcised culture. She very much respected American medicine but like most Europeans of her generation, found circumcision distasteful.
The boys I grew up with were almost all circumcised. The exceptions were mainly foreign born. I suspect that in much of the USA, nearly all caucasian American men born in urban hospitals between 1940 and 1985, to parents who were not seriously poor or first generation Americans, were routinely circumcised at birth. At the same time, mention of this fact was confined to medical circles and a paragraph in child care books.
I can only recall hearing the word “circumcise” spoken by another boy only once before going to college. The boys I grew up with, who were all to quick to joke and boast about so many bawdy topics, apparently did not know that they had undergone minor genital surgery shortly after birth. They did not know what “circumcision” meant in the Bible. To this day, only two persons have spoken the word “foreskin” in my presence (one is my wife).
I was very ashamed about the way that the most personal part of my body, the tip of my penis, looked quite different from that of my father, brother, and the boys I knew in school and summer camp. At the same time, I looked like the nude men in Old Masters, and like my European cousins. I had absolutely no clue why my genitalia were deviant until at age 13, I chanced on an encyclopedia article that informed me that all boys were born looking like me, and that the men and boys around me looked different because they had been surgically altered shortly after birth.
Very soon after learning about circumcision, my doctor queried me about it while examining me. He seemed mainly concerned that I was at risk of humiliation. When he asked me whether the boys with whom I went to school were circumcised, I lied and said I didn’t know (in fact, all were but one). No other health professional has ever commented on my foreskin.
I did not learn that there was no compelling hygienic reason for me to be circumcised until I was 19. I did did not learn that American obstetric practice was mistaken in this regard until I was 31. But I was so nervous about my foreskin that I did not lose my virginity until I was nearly 37, to the woman who is now my spouse. I was quite lucky; she had had previously two intact lovers. Even though she is of my generation, for her circ is cosmetic surgery, not a medical necessity. Moreover, she discovered the foreskin at 13 years of age, while poring over diagrams in the Britannica, and looking closely at male nudes in art. For her, the foreskin is quite erotic.
I spent about 20 years of my life burning with heterosexual lust, but not daring to indulge that lust for fear that a young American woman would either have no clue that my foreskin was normal, or would break up with me because my penis disgusted her. A complicating factor was that Jewish women excited me most of all. I assumed that Jewish women simply could not be intimate with an intact man, unless they were very much on the left and the man was black. Only much later did I learn that there are secular Jewish women who are foreskin fetishists.
I now live in a nation that used to circumcise, but has given it up. That I am intact is a matter of no moment whatsoever for anybody except my wife, who very much enjoys foreplay with my foreskin. Circumcision is definitely on the wane in the English speaking world, but is more common in western Europe than intactivists realize, if reports from European locker rooms are to be believed. As many as 10% of European young men have either been circumcised for phimosis and the like, or because they like the cut look in American dominated porn. Korea and the Philippines circumcise, and getting cut is a way young Japanese men express themselves.
If circumcision reduces AIDS, why is there a lot more AIDS in circumcised USA than in any other North Atlantic nation? It is also very easy to forget that the equation is not intact = disease, but intact + trashy sex life + no condom = disease.
I predict that the foreskin will come to be seen as a nontrivial enhancer of intercourse. Whether or not that is true doesn’t matter and may be unprovable; I am only saying it will come to be thought true. And when that day comes, routine infant circumcision will vanish from the USA. The reason is that all too many women have mediocre and unsatisfying sex lives (for which men are mostly to blame). These women are ripe for a scapegoat, and a ready one at hand is “I often/sometimes don’t climax because my DH doesn’t have a foreskin.” By no means is this necessarily true; I am only commenting on the likely future course of urban myth.